ON 4 OCTOBER, AS CHAMPIONS LEAGUE football returned to St James’s Park, there was a strange subtext to the fixture. For the visitors were Paris St Germain. At a press conference preceding the game, journalists asked if the identity of Newcastle United’s opponents brought an extra edge to what was already a big occasion.
This “edge” was not about Anglo-French rivalry, even though it was in the north-east of England during the Napoleonic Wars that, according to legend, residents hanged a shipwrecked monkey, believing him to be a spy. Nor was it about
